Beautifully Damaged

29. Oblivion

A cold, dark malevolence slithered into my attention, flickering in the weak light of my peripheral vision. The temperature in the atmosphere took a nosedive and I pulled myself away from Drake to look around. White noise crept higher in volume, drowning out the sounds of the storm.

I could see every individual rain drop as it fell, like wet paint sliding across a canvas. Lightning crawled across the sky, every individual spike and branch revealing itself separately. Time slipped by, the revolutions of the earth turning through molasses.

Then everything just... stopped.

The lightning strike was as constant a light source as the moon. Raindrops hung like tiny crystals in the grasp of time. Rustling trees became the statues of Mother Nature: the world became silent.

I stared out at the impossibly still universe around me. Drake's grip on my wrist tightened, but I didn't remember him ever taking it in his hand.

"Drake?" I asked, tugging my arm again. "Let go of me," I whispered, surprised that my voice carried at all- that it hadn't died with the other sounds around me. "What's going on?"

Peering further into his face, I watched his pupils dilate. Minute quivers travelled up my arm as the shadows in Drake's face increased. He was struggling with something, I just didn't know what. Alarm had me yanking my arm harder, nearly pulling my shoulder out of its socket with force.

"What are you doing?"

I glanced at his eyes again, trying to see if Drake was still in there somewhere. His pupils yawned, a cavernous abyss of swimming darkness. Tingling numbness spread throughout my body, starting at my toes and fingers. I pried at his stony fingers, twisting at pulling at my wrist. Succeeding only in breaking the skin around my wrist, I lost feeling in my hands.

Weakness followed the numb sensation in my limbs, and the static noise in the air began again. Drake's grip relinquished my arm just as my legs gave out. My teeth clicked together as my knees smacked against the pavement, splashing water out of a puddle and into my already damp jeans.

I tried to put my hands out to catch me before I hit the pavement, but I couldn't find the energy to pick them up against the rising pavement. Managing to twist was all I could do before I hit the ground shoulder-first. My head bounced against the tar.

I waited for the inevitable darkness to swallow me, but nothing happened, I was trapped inside of my own body.

White noise screamed in my ears, and I almost wished that the darkness would come for me. It never did. The weight of my body lifted off of me and the scenery blurred around me, like I was moving at a thousand miles an hour.

My bizarre weightlessness gave me a sharp rush of vertigo, and stomach churning nausea. The ground beneath me spun faster until nothing was discernable but the whip of a silent wind.

The sharp pang in my skull faded to an ever-present throb. Was this what it was like to die? I thought to myself distantly. Surely it would feel more... real than it did. My thoughts, while quiet and more like background noise than I could remember, were still evidently existent. I found myself doubting what I had made out to be my death. So what was it?

Silence dropped among the staccato white noise that filled my actuality.

There was something different about this silence. Before, never ending quiet had sounded comforting, or at least felt like something. This soundless reality was intangible, empty and so complete.

I couldn't even hear my own heartbeat.

***

Drake struggled against Him with a vengeance, trying to see past the endless gloom of his own mind. He could see Blaise fall to her knees and then pass out on the floor in front of him. A cold smirk graced his face, tugging unnaturally at his mouth.